From a small tool kit he selected a specially designed screwdriver, and working slowly, he carefully and silently backed out the eight screws holding the louvered panel in place. In an operating room no germs could be allowed to enter. It was akin to the air system in a medical operating theater, only in reverse. Air was pumped into the room and any air that escaped could do so only through a complex system of scrubbers, washers, and detectors. Ten incoming air vents kept the cavern cool, the air fresh. Rothstein, whose real name was Vladimir Ivanovich Tsarev, Vladi to his friends at the Frunze Naval Academy, took a small penlight from his pocket and flashed it once on the legend marked above the louvered opening: I-A-7.
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Nevertheless he hesitated at the louvers for a full ten minutes, listening for anything, a stray scrap of conversation, a footfall, a clink of metal against metal, the vault door opening or closing. After a few moments he continued, coming at length to a louvered opening in the air duct. The only sounds, however, were the gentle rushing of the airconditioning and the low-pitched rumble of some machinery.
He stopped when he could make out the square shape of the source, and he held his breath to listen. Fifty feet farther he began to finally see the first diffuse glimmerings of light, dull and red flashing, he realized as he crawled closer to its source. The man who’d been known as Benjamin Rothstein to his superiors for the past eighteen months wiped his brow with the back of his hand and continued. To be caught here, of all places, would mean a certain and probably unpleasant death. He was sweating profusely even though the air streaming past the back of his head was cool, almost cold.
He moved cautiously lest he make a noise or stumble upon one of the many down shafts that plunged a hundred feet deeper into the bedrock. A man dressed in Israeli battle fatigues crawled slowly through an air duct a few feet at a time. Night or day-it did not matter three hundred feet beneath the desert.Īll was in darkness.